Extensions Beyond Habitation

Event overview

Urbanization has not only become more extensive as an ongoing, increasingly dominant process of spatial production and realignment, with a coherent set of constitutive dynamics, but also extends itself into a a wider multiplicity of situations and histories. It offers a particular working-out of dilemmas, tipping points, and conjunctures faced by settlements, and this working-out entails various equations of subsumption, adaptation, erasure, remaking, conciliation, and improvisation.

Urbanization is something that not only spreads out as a function of its own internal operations, but is something contributed to through an intensely differentiated process of encounter, enabling it to change gears and operate through a wider range of appearances and instantiations. If urbanization is extensive, it is not only in the sense that it covers more ground or becomes an increasingly hegemonic modality of spatial and social production, but that it also shows up as a key facet in the vernaculars and operations of institutions and sectors not previously considered urban.

The urban also extends beyond “habitability”—something that exceeds habitation and that requires different ways of “living-with.” From Jakarta to Delhi to Athens, the talk considers some of these ways—from dirty computing to popular propositioning.

AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. He is an urbanist with an abiding interest in the spatial and social compositions of urban regions. He is a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, visiting professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara. He brings to the Urban Institute a long background working in urban areas of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in the everyday lives of Muslim working-class residents.